Must do better – the new Walter de Gruyter website

Update (23rd Jan): I’ve heard indirectly that Walter de Gruyter are working on the RSS issue mentioned below.

I’ve been involved in the redesign of a number of websites, and I know how much effort needs to go into ensuring that everything runs smoothly once the new site is available. It’s understandable that occasionally things may go wrong, and usually these are corrected as quickly as possible.

However, I’m disappointed with the new Walter de Gruyter website. De Gruyter publish high-quality journals and books in the humanities and natural sciences. Many of their journal titles are reasonably priced, so that is a plus.

Visually, their new website looks fine. They seem to have misplaced some images, but I expect that will be fixed. Not being able to filter their product types by journals, without also getting yearbooks, is a minor annoyance.

They have obviously been experiencing problems: “We would like to apologize to all customers for any inconvenience caused by the switch to our new web presence. Since we launched the platform at the end of December 2011, we have been fixing a great deal of teething problems so far and are keeping up the hard work to sort out the remaining issues.”

It’s not good for them to have this on the front page (where there are no links from ‘Login’ etc):

I’ve noticed recent tweets and emails by libraries such as the following:

There is currently a problem with access to some content on Walter de Gruyter, which they are working to fix as soon as possible.

It’s been three weeks since the migration and we continue to experience
access problems. Does everyone else have the same problem or is it just us

> Jenny, I just tried it a little while ago, and from my perspective
> they have NOT solved much of anything…

>> I was able to send an email but no response yet. Is anyone able to
>> access their de Gruyter content yet? Our institution is recognized,
>> but I get an error when I try to read our journal content.

I expect that such things will be fixed, if they haven’t already been dealt with.

I can’t see any Twitter presence for them indicated on their website.

But what annoys me the most is what they’ve done to their RSS feeds. As any regular reader of this blog will know, I’m a great fan of RSS, but with the new de Gruyter website, if you want to get a Table of Contents feed for any of their journals you now have to register, and I think that even then, you can only use the feed as part of a session with their website only.

This is what happpens when you click on: Get eTOC alerts

I don’t have to register to get feeds from hundreds of other journal publishers, so why should De Gruyter now require me to do so for their feeds?

…and you click on any link from the article title, all you now get is:

Not found

Those feeds will now be defunct, and I don’t think that you’ll be able to subscribe to the new de Gruyter feeds in Reader. Libraries won’t be able to easily include de Gruyter RSS TOC feeds in their OPACs, and aggregators won’t be able to harvest their metadata. De Gruyter page views will suffer.